Creation Facts In Scripture

[Critias]

1. Because they have theological value that is dependent on their being factually accurate. The Creation Myth's theological value is independent of it's factual accuracy.

But far more importantly:
2. Because they have not been demonstrated to factually inaccurate. Creation itself tells us that the Creation Myth is not factually accurate. Nothing tells us that the Resurection story or the Incarnation story are factually inaccurate.

So you don't think science has proven that an egg alone cannot create a child? That an egg and sperm must meet, sperm penetrating the egg to create a child?

Science has proven that a human virgin cannot get pregnant without human sperm; a human egg cannot develop into an embryo without human sperm. It is a scientific fact. So, how can you accept that Jesus was created, within Mary, without the aid of man's sperm?

The logical conclusion of my beliefs is that things that can be easily show to not have happened, didn't happen. Especially if it doesn't matter whether they happened or not. That does not lead me to deny the incarnation story or the resurrection story.

 

[rmwilliamsll]

So you don't think science has proven that an egg alone cannot create a child? That an egg and sperm must meet, sperm penetrating the egg to create a child?

Science has proven that a human virgin cannot get pregnant without human sperm; a human egg cannot develop into an embryo without human sperm. It is a scientific fact. So, how can you accept that Jesus was created, within Mary, without the aid of man's sperm?

that's not true.
science's major tool is induction, induction never proves anything 100%, the best it does is the legal term: beyond reasonable doubt.

science says something like, we have never seen a virgin birth, we have examples of parthogenesis in lizards for example, we have examples of freezing and thawing eggs of mammals and have them divide a few times, but we have never recorded a virgin birth among human beings. but we can not rule it out, only rule it very very unlikely given what we currently know.


....

 

[ebia]

So you don't think science has proven that an egg alone cannot create a child? That an egg and sperm must meet, sperm penetrating the egg to create a child?

Science has proven that a human virgin cannot get pregnant without human sperm; a human egg cannot develop into an embryo without human sperm. It is a scientific fact. So, how can you accept that Jesus was created, within Mary, without the aid of man's sperm?

We didn't need science to tell us that - Mary, Joseph and everyone else at the time knew that babies can't happen that way. A miracle is, by definiton, an exception to the normal rules.

Science confirms what everyone always knew, that babies don't happen without sex. It doesn't say that the virgin birth didn't happen, just that it could not have happened (naturally). Science can have nothing to say about miracles, since they are, by definition, exceptions to the rules science studies. One would have to look to history to prove that the virgin birth never happened, not science. Science speaks about the normal, and the natural, not the one-off and the supernatural.

On the other hand, science shows that creation never happened the way Genesis describes. Not just that it couldn't happen that way, but that it actually didn't happen that way.

 

[ebia]

And Crusadar, as usual, belittling the faith of the TEs.

Faith in what - the power of evolution or the creative genius of God? It is the former that I attack. And thanks, I like to think that I am doing my job.

Why do you feel the need to attack a natural mechanism of God's creation?

 

[rmwilliamsll]

We didn't need science to tell us that - Mary, Joseph and everyone else at the time knew that babies can't happen that way. A miracle is, by definiton, an exception to the normal rules.

Science confirms what everyone always knew, that babies don't happen without sex. It doesn't say that the virgin birth didn't happen, just that it could not have happened (naturally). Science can have nothing to say about miracles, since they are, by definition, exceptions to the rules science studies. One would have to look to history to prove that the virgin birth never happened, not science. Science speaks about the normal, and the natural, not the one-off and the supernatural.

On the other hand, science shows that creation never happened the way Genesis describes. Not just that it couldn't happen that way, but that it actually didn't happen that way.

that brings up an interesting question.
does science say that it couldn't have happened?
for instance, God could have written the equivalent of a back door into genetics so that under certain rare conditions virgin births happen naturally.
science could detect and deal with this if it was looking in the right place.


....

 

[ebia]

I think that pretty much sums up the approach of many TE's though most don't want to admit it so frankly. You'll go along with what the 'intellectual community' says as long as it doesn't alter the important theological truths of Scripture too much.

Um, yes, of course. If I can see something is true, why wouldn't I go along with it? To do otherwise is willful ignorance.

Again you have not addressed the issue that improtant theological truths are founded in actual events and real people, which the same 'intellectual community' dismiss as nonsense.

It's not the same 'intellectual community'. Nice try, but 'the intellectual community' does not speak with a single voice on all issues - we aren't talking about the Roman Catholic Church here.

The general consensus of the experts is that the resurrection did not happen.

I'm not particually interested in the general consensus, I'm interested in what can be shown to be true.

God Himself says that from a human perspective, the story is foolishness.

The favourite quote to prove that everyone who disagrees with me is a fool.

Why did God choose to use the crucifixion of Christ as the means of bringing salvation to the human race. One of the important reasons was that He wanted to use events that the wise of this world would dismiss as folly. He wanted something that would require humility and faith to accept and embrace. This message doesn't require a profound intellect to grasp its significance. It is for the sinner with the humility too own his worthlessness in God's sight, and reach out and receive God's help.

The 'folly' is in an all-powerful God becoming a limited man and then choosing to be executed in a horribly painful manner just as he is starting his teaching career and apparently before he'd achieved anything, leaving a bunch of incompetent, cowardly, fools to carry on with the work. The miracles surrounding the incarnation & resurrection have huge theological implications, and I don't see anyone here denying them, but they aren't where the 'folly' lies.

Could the same be said about Creation. To some the story seems too simplistic to be real. Perhaps God created our world as plainly described in Genesis so that those with the humility and faith to receive His word would be given the most profound insight into our origins and the most pervasive and perplexing problems faced by the human soul. At the same time the 'wise of this world' would pass over it as mere foolishness.

All of those theological implications are still there when you read it as myth. They just stand out more clearly.

 

[vossler]

First of all rm this was an interesting and thought provoking post that I enjoyed reading. One of the few from TEs where this could be said. Thanks!

This is an excellent example of how the concept of faith changed over the last 200 years as it encountered science that seemed to contradict traditional understandings of the Bible.

What traditional understandings of the Bible do you speak of?

Essentially what you are saying is that Christianity is irrational, faith is irrational and furthermore that the more you believe in irrational and unreasonable things the more your faith is being used. This represents an enormous departure from historical Christianity which teaches that the resurrection is not irrational but extrarational, not against reason but too high for reason to fully grasp.

OK, since extrarational isn’t an actual word I’ll go with your definition of it “not being against reason but too high for reason to fully grasp.” Wouldn’t something that was too high for reason to fully grasp be considered irrational? In order to fully understand your point, please show me where the Bible teaches that the resurrection is as you described.

The YECist propose to believe in an irrational faith that contradicts the evidence of their eyes. That the world is very young despite all the evidences that it truely is very old. And like this posting do so on the mistaken grounds that this is the exercise of faithfulness to God. To believe 3 impossible things before breakfast. What it actually is, is the acceptance of a two storey theory, that the spiritual realm and the physical realm are distinct, that faith being superior to reason is also opposed to it.

The foolishness of God is not irrationality, it is not that God is deceiving us with a universe created with the appearance of age, it is not simply that our eyes deceive us and we are to ignore the evidence before us. It is the foolishness to claim that reason and man's wisdom are sufficient to understand the Creator of the Universe and His ways. It is that it is foolish to claim that the transcendent God cares enough to become man. YECism misses the point that God's dealings with man are not irrational and inaccessible to reason but that God's foolishness exceeds that grasp of even the wisest man. It is not that the wise of science is worthless, it is that it will never be enough. That man's arms no matter how long we think they may be will never reach to God, that He has to reach down from heaven to pick us up.

I would say this isn’t true at all. Wouldn’t all the modern day evidence tell us that for a man to rise from the dead it would be considered irrational? No one today could say they’ve seen someone rise from the dead, yet all of us who claim to be Christians believe it happened. All the worldly knowledge would tell us this couldn’t happen, yet we believe it.

Remember this ‘evidence’ that you state as being truth isn’t as strong as you make it out to be. The ‘evidence of their eyes’ is in fact not based on something we can actually see, but on faith. The science behind it is based on a lot of extrapolation that requires an awful lot of faith. Faith in the fact that measurements taken in the last hundred years or so can be extrapolated into billions of years is, you'll have to admit, quite a leap of faith.

To me it’s no different than that of a doctor declaring a cure for cancer based upon findings found in experiments of a few individuals over a period of a few months. Most other doctors would dismiss such findings out of hand, due to an improper and insufficient method of evaluation. Now this doesn’t mean that a cure wasn’t necessarily found, just that it would take far more work and a much larger period of time in order to conclusively to find it to be true. Most medical findings that initially showed tremendous promise were found to be faulty and unproductive.

Yet with evolution people are told to accept it as truth when in fact we truly can’t do so. For us to declare, based on recent observations, that we can determine, with a degree of certainty, the age of the earth and universe to be billions of years old is rather arrogant of us, especially considering that, at best, we can say human record keeping is only a few thousand years in the making. Then to come to the definitive conclusion, with the speculative evidence available, that life as we know it was a molecules to man transformation, well that is just plain foolishness.

This all comes down to what is your foundation. If it’s the Bible then everything I see will be weighed according to it. If it’s man’s understanding and knowledge then everything I see will be weighed according to that.

With the Bible as my foundation then your statement of “God's foolishness exceeds that grasp of even the wisest man” isn’t all that incredulous because it is in fact foolishness for man to think that he could discover something contrary to God’s written Word.

Look, I don’t have a problem with us teaching the theory of evolution in school as long as it is taught right along with the theory of scientific creationism. I believe that scientific creationism can stand quite well on its own two feet and we can let our kids decide for themselves which to believe.

And that is the folly of YECist, to discard the wisdom of the world, thinking it worthless rather than thinking it defective and in need of enlightenment from above. Rather than engaging with culture it is the continuing desire to flee from and to hide from culture or science because they are unable to meet it's claims.

This is where TEs have it all wrong. We don’t discard the wisdom of the world, we just put it beneath the wisdom of God’s Word. We most certainly are never encouraged to engage with the culture in order to be enlightened, but rather we are called to engage in order to enlighten the culture.

It is sad and is half of a fully Biblical faith, hiding behind a serious anti-intellectualism and a deprecated view of reason and it's relationship to faith. Go ahead claim that the world is 6K years old and that believing this impossible thing is equivalent to believing that Jesus is God incarnate and suffered on the Cross. Conflate your mistaken exegesis of Genesis with the Gospel itself and drive anyone with 1/2 a brain out of the Church because they dare to think. As for me, i will continue to dedicate all that God has gifted me, intellect as well as will to service in engaging the world and understanding what great things God has done in history and in the physical world, to be grateful for all of His great gifts, including the ability to read the book of works.

Now, from what little I do know about you, one thing I wouldn't have said was that you were dismissive. Yet, here you dismiss YECers based on anti-intellectualism. Please be honest and tell me where the world's great intellectuals are. Would you agree that most of them are on college campuses and within the scientific community? Are these bodies not the true harbingers of secularism, agnosticism and atheism? My goal or desire isn't that people not think about and ponder these issues. No, quite the opposite, I want them to be aware of all the facts and to let the Lord Jesus Himself, through the Holy Spirit, guide people to the truth. Why don't we let the chips fall where they may and teach both sciences so that people can make up their own minds? I believe there is good science to support creationism and there are many well-respected scientists who are creationists. So, at least for me, this isn't an argument about intellectualism but one of faith and trust in what God's Word says.

 

[ebia]

that brings up an interesting question.
does science say that it couldn't have happened?
for instance, God could have written the equivalent of a back door into genetics so that under certain rare conditions virgin births happen naturally.
science could detect and deal with this if it was looking in the right place.


....

Genetics isn't my speciality, but from what I know it would seem pretty implausible. And even if it were possible, I would have thought you would have to end up with a female child - nowhere to get a Y-Chromosome from.

 

[Micaiah]

that brings up an interesting question.
does science say that it couldn't have happened?
for instance, God could have written the equivalent of a back door into genetics so that under certain rare conditions virgin births happen naturally.
science could detect and deal with this if it was looking in the right place.

The point is that the all scientific evidence we have at present indicates that virgins don't conceive, and people don't rise from the dead. Yet TE's choose to accept what Scripture teaches on these matters.

 

[Floodnut]

1. Because they have theological value that is dependent on their being factually accurate. The Creation Myth's theological value is independent of it's factual accuracy.

But far more importantly:
2. Because they have not been demonstrated to factually inaccurate. Creation itself tells us that the Creation Myth is not factually accurate. Nothing tells us that the Resurection story or the Incarnation story are factually inaccurate.



The logical conclusion of my beliefs is that things that can be easily show to not have happened, didn't happen. Especially if it doesn't matter whether they happened or not. That does not lead me to deny the incarnation story or the resurrection story.

Bottom line is that you still choose to take the historical statements about Jesus as true, even though they state as factual events things that are impossible according to science. The TEs here dodge this issue, but it remains. You take the statements about Jesus as historical, but for some reason you decide to take statements about Creation as non-historical, even though Jesus and Peter treated the Genesis accounts of Creation and the Flood as historical.

I am sure you could also invent a theology in which the factuality of the incarnation "story" and the resurrection "story" is also irrelevant.

 

[ebia]

The point is that the all scientific evidence we have at present indicates that virgins don't conceive, and people don't rise from the dead. Yet TE's choose to accept what Scripture teaches on these matters.

Yep.

Because science only says they don't (normally) happen. Not that they didn't happen. Science (by definition) can't prove that miracles never happen.

Bottom line is that you still choose to take the historical statements about Jesus as true, even though they state as factual events things that are impossible according to science.

Science doesn't say these things did not happen, just that they cannot happen within the rules that science studies. A miracle occurs, by definition, outside those rules. Everyone has always know that a Virgin Birth or people rising from the dead are impossible - that's the whole point of miracles. To prove that the virgin birth did not happen you would need things like a DNA test showing Joseph was Jesus' biological father. We don't and never will have anything like that.

Creation, and a global flood are different, because science doesn't just say they can't happen, but that there is irrefutable evidence that they did not happen.

The TEs here dodge this issue, but it remains.

It's not a dodge - you've been told several times what the difference is.

You take the statements about Jesus as historical, but for some reason you decide to take statements about Creation as non-historical, even though Jesus and Peter treated the Genesis accounts of Creation and the Flood as historical.

The fact that Jesus and Peter talked about those stories in a way that is compatible with them being history doesn't demonstrate that they are history. It doesn't even demonstrate that Jesus or Peter thought they were.

 

[notto]

The TEs here dodge this issue, but it remains.

Falsification has been discussed here many times. The issue hasn't been dodged, you simply refuse to accept the answers you are given.

A virgin birth or the ressurection (or Christs other miracles) have not (and at this point can not) be falsfied through investigation. They are accepted on faith. A global flood and a young earth have been falsified by several independent lines of evidence (even through miraculous means). I can't accept something that has been proven to be false on faith. That's just plain silly.

 

[Crusadar]

Why do you feel the need to attack a natural mechanism of God's creation?

Actually evolution is entirely a concoction of man, for the simple fact that no where in scripture does it say God used such a mechanism (nor can be scientifically proven). So why defend a process that is foolishness to God?

 

[artybloke]

Why do you feel the need to attack a natural mechanism of God's creation?

Actually evolution is entirely a concoction of man, for the simple fact that no where in scripture does it say God used such a mechanism (nor can be scientifically proven). So why defend a process that is foolishness to God?

Actually, you're literalistic interpretation of Genesis is what's concocted. I don't see God anywhere mentioning gravity either; should we start believing it's all held up by angels?

And the fact is, whether you like it or not, or whether you wish to deny what you see or not, the evidence (all of it) has already falsified every other explanation than evolution.

Creationism is a foolish concotion of men who refuse to live in the real world.

 

[ebia]

Why do you feel the need to attack a natural mechanism of God's creation?

Actually evolution is entirely a concoction of man, for the simple fact that no where in scripture does it say God used such a mechanism (nor can be scientifically proven). So why defend a process that is foolishness to God?

Nowhere in scripture does it say God created Australia, but I'm pretty certain it does exist, and I don't see how my claiming that it exists is foolishness to God.

Actually, you're literalistic interpretation of Genesis is what's concocted. I don't see God anywhere mentioning gravity either; should we start believing it's all held up by angels?

And the fact is, whether you like it or not, or whether you wish to deny what you see or not, the evidence (all of it) has already falsified every other explanation than evolution.

Creationism is a foolish concotion of men who refuse to live in the real world.

What he said.

 

[Micaiah]

And the fact is, whether you like it or not, or whether you wish to deny what you see or not, the evidence (all of it) has already falsified every other explanation than evolution.

With experiments like the peppered moths?

Creationism is a foolish concotion of men who refuse to live in the real world.

Obviously people who live in the real world can't spell either.

 

[Micaiah]

A virgin birth or the ressurection (or Christs other miracles) have not (and at this point can not) be falsfied through investigation. They are accepted on faith. A global flood and a young earth have been falsified by several independent lines of evidence (even through miraculous means). I can't accept something that has been proven to be false on faith. That's just plain silly.

Not sure about you Notto, but I can think of ways to devise experiments that prove people don't rise from the dead and virgins do not spontaneously conceive. These experiments are repeatable and observable, unlike some with which we are familiar.

 

[notto]

Not sure about you Notto, but I can think of ways to devise experiments that prove people don't rise from the dead and virgins do not spontaneously conceive. These experiments are repeatable and observable, unlike some with which we are familiar.

Hense the use of the word 'miracle' and 'faith'.

 

[Critias]

Because science only says they don't (normally) happen. Not that they didn't happen. Science (by definition) can't prove that miracles never happen.

And therefore science cannot say creation is six days never happened. It was a miracle.

 

[Critias]

Because science only says they don't (normally) happen. Not that they didn't happen. Science (by definition) can't prove that miracles never happen.


Creation, and a global flood are different, because science doesn't just say they can't happen, but that there is irrefutable evidence that they did not happen.

I just wanted to point this out here. First you state science cannot prove a miracle never happened. Next, you state science can prove that the creation miracle never happened.

So, can science now prove only 1 miracle wrong but not others? Is this a special exception to the rule?